Applying ITIL Guiding Principles on the Customer Journey

As recommended by ITIL, guiding principles helps organization in supporting actions and making good decisions. Customer Journey is the logical representation of the steps followed by Service Provider and Service Consumer together to realize the Value. In this article, author has tried to identify the most applicable guiding principles over the customer journey from author’s perspective.

 

ITIL Guiding Principles

 

According to ITIL, a guiding principle is a recommendation that guides organization in all circumstances, regardless of changes in its goals, strategies, type of work, or management structure. A guiding principle is universal and enduring.

 

The guiding principles defined here embody the core messages of ITIL and of service management in general, supporting successful actions and good decisions of all types and at all levels. They can be used to guide organizations in their work as they adopt a service management approach and adapt ITIL guidance to their own specific needs and circumstances. The guiding principles encourage and support organizations in continual improvement at all levels

 

In my view, these guiding principles are the approaches which needs to be adopted by each and every individual operating in service management domain. These principles are very pure and basic in nature. These are not applicable only at organizational level, anyways unless these are adopted by each individual in the organization, we cannot say that organization is following these principles. Organizations should work on identifying the ways to encourage employees to adopt these guiding principles and follow in day-to-day operations.

 

ITIL Customer Journey

 

As per ITIL, Customer Journey is the logical representation of the steps followed by Service Consumer and Service Provider together to realize the Value. Mastering this customer journey helps to maximize stakeholder value through co-creation, focusing on both outcomes and experience.

The purposes of identifying, understanding, and mastering the customer journey is to Facilitate outcome and experience, optimize risk and compliance and optimize resources and minimize costs.

Let’s see how these purposes will serv to service consumer and service provider both

Purpose	For the Service Consumer	For the Service Provider
Facilitate outcome and experience	To gain optimal service value and experience from the service relationship To understand what the service consumer needs and desires, not just what the customer states	To identify and support specific service consumer behaviors and outcomes To optimize and improve products, services, and customer journeys for future value realization
Optimize risk and compliance	To ensure key service consumer risks have been identified and addressed	To focus on the customer satisfaction issues and key areas with the highest pay-outs related to costs
Optimize resources and minimize costs	To work together with the service provider to commit and optimize the use of resources during the service lifecycle	To work together with the service consumer to commit and optimize the use of resources during the service lifecycle To be fair and transparent regarding costs

 

 

Customer Journey map -

 

Customer Journey steps detailed –

 

 

Step	Objective	Activities
Explore	Understand needs and value and identify stakeholders	Understanding service consumers and their needs Understanding service providers and their offers Understanding markets Targeting markets
Engage	Build Relationships	Communicating and collaborating Understanding relationship types Building Service relationships Managing suppliers and partners
Offer	Specify requirements	Managing demand and opportunities Specifying and managing customer requirements Designing service offerings and user experience Selling and obtaining service offerings
Agree	Negotiate and agree service utility, warranty and experience	Agreeing and planning value co-creation Negotiating and agreeing a service
Onboard	Procure and perform customer transition activities	Planning onboarding Relating to users and fostering relationships Providing user engagement and delivery channels Enabling users for services Elevating mutual capabilities Offboarding customers and users
Co-create	Consume service and engage in the service interaction	Fostering a service mindset Ongoing service interactions Nurturing user communities
Realize	Track, assess and evaluate value.	Realizing service value in different settings Tracking value realization Assessing and reporting value realization Evaluating value realization and improving customer journeys Realizing value for the service provider

 

 

Mapping of possible application of ITIL Guiding Principles on the ITIL customer Journey

Relating ITIL Guiding Principles on the ITIL customer Journey steps

 

Step 1 – EXPLORE

 

Recommended guiding principles -

 

Focus on value	Everything that the organization does needs to map, directly or indirectly, to value for the stakeholders.
Collaborate and promote visibility	Working together across boundaries produces results that have greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives, and increased likelihood of long-term success.
Think and work holistically	No service, or element used to provide a service, stands alone.

 

 

Objective of Explore step is to Understand needs and value and identify stakeholders.

In order to achieve this objective, organization need to ‘Think and work holistically’ to identify the different stakeholders, their dependencies and the expectation. ‘Collaborate and promote visibility’ shall help organization for better collaboration among the stakeholders to define the value composition and the ‘Focus on value’ principle shall help in mapping the required activities to realize the targeted value.

 

 

Step 2 – ENGAGE

 

Recommended guiding principles -

 

 

Start where you are	Do not start from scratch and build something new without considering what is already available to be leveraged.
Progress iteratively with feedback	Do not attempt to do everything at once. Even huge initiatives must be accomplished iteratively.
Collaborate and promote visibility	Working together across boundaries produces results that have greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives, and increased likelihood of long-term success.

 

 

Objective of Engage step is to build relationships

‘Collaborate and promote visibility’ shall help organization for better collaboration among the stakeholders to move towards common objective as a team. ‘Progress iteratively with feedback’ approach shall help to identify the short-term goals. Proper communication plan will keep all stakeholders updated in what will be the outcome for each of stakeholder group from each iteration along with the inputs required by each by them. This shall help all stakeholders to plan the resources and time required from there side and also, they can validate the progress against the pre-determined goals. Following the ‘Start where you are’ principle, project organization shall validate the usages of artifacts, process, templates etc. from previous interactions or individual experience.

 

 

Step 3 – OFFER

 

Recommended guiding principles -

 

Collaborate and promote visibility	Working together across boundaries produces results that have greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives, and increased likelihood of long-term success.
Think and work holistically	No service, or element used to provide a service, stands alone.
Keep it simple and practical	If a process, service, action or metric fails to provide value or produce a useful outcome eliminate it.

 

 

Objective of Offer step is to specify requirements

Most of the times Service Consumers have expectations rather than requirements. This might be due to unawareness of the potential or challenges related to the technical services being used to deliver the actual services. In such cases, ‘Collaborate and promote visibility’ shall Service Provider to be transparent during requirement capturing which will be used to define the offerings. This collaboration should not be limited to challenges only. Service Provider should follow ‘Think and work holistically’ to identify the possible challenges, risks and opportunities.

These challenges, risks and opportunities needs to be discussed, explained and addressed with the respective stakeholders before designing the customer specific offerings. The most important thig is offering should be simple and practical which should help customer to realize the expected value.

 

 

Step 4 – AGREE

 

Recommended guiding principles -

 

Focus on value	Everything that the organization does needs to map, directly or indirectly, to value for the stakeholders
Start where you are	Do not start from scratch and build something new without considering what is already available to be leveraged.
Progress iteratively with feedback	Do not attempt to do everything at once. Even huge initiatives must be accomplished iteratively.

 

 

Objective of Agree step is to Negotiate and agree service utility, warranty and experience

After defining the offering for specific customer, service provider shall explain the value proposition to the service consumer. And service consumer needs to map this value proposition against cost benefit analysis while taking decision. Once decided, this understanding has to be documented in form of an agreement clearly defining the desired outcomes along with dependencies, requirements, assumptions and exceptions. ‘Focus on value’ principle shall help in identifying the activities to be followed for value co-creation. ‘Start where you are’ shall help in defining the service levels / targets to be realistic comparing to existing / previous services. ‘Progress iteratively with feedback’ shall help to define the short terms targets to achieve the overall the service level / targets over the period.

 

Step 5 – ONBOARD

 

Recommended guiding principles -

 

Progress iteratively with feedback	Do not attempt to do everything at once. Even huge initiatives must be accomplished iteratively.
Collaborate and promote visibility	Working together across boundaries produces results that have greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives, and increased likelihood of long-term success.
Think and work holistically	No service, or element used to provide a service, stands alone.
Optimize and automate	Resources of all types, particularly HR, should be used to their best effect. Eliminate anything that is truly wasteful and use technology to achieve whatever it is capable of.

 

Objective of Onboard step is to Procure and perform customer transition activities

 

Before initiating transition, ‘Think and work holistically’ to understand the overall dependencies / challenges in addition to technical services such as OCM requirements, user training programs etc. Once identified the dependencies and challenges, these shall be addressed using ‘Progress iteratively with feedback’ approach. It means, take shorter steps to deal with challenges. Prioritize the challenges and address them iteratively, while doing this Collaborate with the respective stakeholders, communicate the status / updates and most importantly see the opportunities to ‘Optimize and automate’ overall transition to avoid the human dependency and manual errors which will to enhance the user experience.

 

Step 6 – CO-CREATE

 

Recommended guiding principles -

 

 

Focus on value	Everything that the organization does needs to map, directly or indirectly, to value for the stakeholders.
Collaborate and promote visibility	Working together across boundaries produces results that have greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives, and increased likelihood of long-term success.
Collaborate and promote visibility	If a process, service, action or metric fails to provide value or produce a useful outcome eliminate it.
Optimize and automate	Resources of all types, particularly HR, should be used to their best effect. Eliminate anything that is truly wasteful and use technology to achieve whatever it is capable of.

 

 

Objective of Co-create step is to Procure and perform customer transition activities

The critical requirement for successful value creation is all stakeholders should ‘Collaborate and promote visibility’. Collaboration shall help in sharing the experiences, challenges and address these challenges collectively to enhance the overall user perception about services. ‘Focus on value’ principle shall help to identify and map the activities required during value co-creation while ‘Keep it simple and practical’ shall help in identifying the waste (steps not creating value for anybody). Follow the principle ‘Optimize and automate’ to reduce this waste using the automation wherever possible to optimize the services.

 

 

Step 7 – REALIZE

 

Recommended guiding principles -

 

Focus on value	Everything that the organization does needs to map, directly or indirectly, to value for the stakeholders.
Think and work holistically	No service, or element used to provide a service, stands alone.
Keep it simple and practical	If a process, service, action or metric fails to provide value or produce a useful outcome eliminate it.
Optimize and automate	Resources of all types, particularly HR, should be used to their best effect. Eliminate anything that is truly wasteful and use technology to achieve whatever it is capable of.

 

 

Objective of Realize step is to Track, assess and evaluate the value

Guiding principle ‘Keep it simple and practical’ helps organization to decide the appropriate measures to quantify the value while ‘Optimize and automate’ helps to set the automated measurement of metrics wherever possible. The important consideration while evaluating the value is ‘Think and work holistically’ as no service, or element used to provide a service, stands alone. During evaluation we need to focus on identifying the value leakage by following ‘Focus on value’ principle.

 

Conclusion – With the latest trend in Service Management, where the traditional services are becoming obsolete and the emerging in new forms of plug and play services. Various options are available for Service consumers to choose from. In order to maintain the consumers and enhance the consumer perception, service providers need to understand this customer journey thoroughly and identify the opportunities to enhance the customer experience over the journey. I hope that this document shall help service providers to understand the importance of guiding principles and its usage to enhance the overall customer experience.

 

Author Info 

Dr. Sajid Shaikh

ITIL Strategic Leader, ITIL Managing Professional, SIAM Professional

Dr. Sajid Shaikh is a senior IT professional with 20+ years of experience, having vast exposure to ITSM Process Consulting (ITIL / SCRUM -KANBAN), ITSM Tool implementation, Delivering IT solution for products and services, analysing performance, fine tuning process and adept in Continual Service Improvement. He has worked on designing, implementing and executing different Service delivery models (includes Service Desk, Technical Support teams) and has good exposure of working with multi geography international clients on various Consulting, Implementation and Delivery projects.

 

Professional Certifications –

 

• ITIL® 4 Leader: Digital & IT Strategy
• ITIL® 4 Managing Professional Transition
• ITIL® 4 Strategist - Direct, Plan and Improve
• ITIL® 4 Specialist - Create, Deliver and Support
• ITIL® 4 Specialist - Drive Stakeholder Value
• ITIL® 4 Specialist - High - Velocity IT
• ITIL® 4 Specialist – Acquiring & Managing Cloud Services Certificate
• ITIL® Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management
• ITIL® Expert V3
• ITIL® Foundation V3
• ITIL® Service Manager V2
• SIAM™ Professional
• COBIT® 5 Foundation Certificate
• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
• AWS Certified Associated Solution Architect